This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will explore a potential solution to one of the key problems hindering the development of practical computer systems that understand natural language-English, German, etc. In particular, although several different approaches have been taken to codifying linguistic rules, all have suffered from a common scaling problem: a the number of rules is increased to approach coverage of a usable subset of the language, the interactions become so complex and unmanageable that the systems tend to collapse. adding new rules to cover some previously neglected aspect of the language tends to `break` old rules, introducing bugs so that sentences that were once properly interpreted no longer are. This situation is very similar to what happens in the development of large software systems: the process of adding more and more features to existing bodies of software tends to break down as conflicts rapidly accumulate. The recent advent of object-oriented programming (OOP) has had a major beneficial impact on this general software problem. The opportunity exists to adapt OOP techniques to the codification of linguistic rules, allowing the creation of systems that break through the complexity barrier that has previously prevented the rapid development of natural language systems for a wide range of applications. The research objective is to demonstrate a concrete means of structuring linguistic rules as independent `objects` with inheritance, following the OOP paradigm. Goodbyte, Inc. anticipates that this technique will make it far easier to extend natural language grammars without disrupting previous coverage.
